The Tableau Conference Network

/
The Tableau Conference Network

As I embarked on this journey a while back, I had some goals when it came to what I was looking to build. These are summarized in the below bullets.

  • Visualize Twitter network growth in detail using some form of network graph
  • Needed the network graph for each year to be comparable to one another
  • Interactivity against the network graphs was a must
  • Provide a way for the user to view the actual tweets
  • Once Keith and I decided to run parallel with our efforts, we wanted to way to “jump” from one view to the other.

The sections below detail out how I went about trying to achieve each of these goals. Don’t ask me why I gave myself so many of them.

Read More

Concatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria

/
Concatenating Rows into String Lists in Tableau for #VisualizeNoMalaria

As part of the Tableau Foundation/PATH/Zambia Ministry of Health #VisualizeNoMalaria project to eliminate malaria in Zambia by 2020 we had a request to build a “report” to show when health facilities have not submitted malaria incidence data so that administrators and staff can be notified in an easy-to-ready way.   element (such as all the product categories a customer has purchased), etc. Read on for how to do this yourself and learn a bit more about the different levels of detail of data that we work with in Tableau.

Read More

Kids can help #VisualizeNoMalaria!

/
Kids can help #VisualizeNoMalaria!

Hi, my name is Max. I am eleven years old and I am going into sixth grade.  I LOVE video games and Legos. Yesterday, though instead of playing Minecraft, I volunteered by tracing buildings with my Mom, to help support the fight against Malaria in Zambia.  

I did this because I like to be in the wilderness and go camping and have been bitten by mosquitos many times.  I can’t imagine getting sick or dying from just being bitten by a mosquito and don’t think any kid should worry or suffer from this.

It is really easy to help.  If you want to help too, go this link http://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/7/help-visualizenomalaria-56784  and follow the instructions.

Read More

Padawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau

/
Padawan Dojo: SUMIF() in Tableau

Here at DataBlick we're known for doing amazing things with Tableau and teaching others. Our Padawan Dojo series is for new users (and users who help others) to learn how to do your own great things in Tableau. This lesson is about: learning an important mental model for working with Tableau, understanding when and how to do the equivalent of an Excel SUMIF() in Tableau, and finally how to validate the results.  

Read More

Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Hive Plot Part Deux in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Note: This is an incremental post to the circular and hive plot network graphing post. When looking back at my network graphing post recently I remembered one piece of the Hive Plot that I wanted to crack and didn't get to in that original effort. One design element that helps distinguish the Hive Plot is the concept of splitting an interconnected axis into two to help visualize this aspect of a network. I think this helps to view the interconnectivity of an axis within the network you are visualizing. Also, with tools like Tableau, we could even allow for an expand/collapse feature on this axis.

Read More

Jonathan Drummey joining DataBlick full time!

/
Jonathan Drummey joining DataBlick full time!

Last fall, man-about-Tableau Jonathan Drummey (Tableau Zen Master , Tableau Forums Ambassador, leader of the Tableau Healthcare User Group https://community.tableau.com/groups/healthcare, Tableau blogger, etc.) started working with DataBlick part-time. He’s launched the Help Me DataBlick service and @helpmedatablick Tableau tips tweet stream and has had so much fun he’s joining DataBlick full-time! That’s right!  You can have the amazing Jonathan Drummey work on your project!  Besides project-based work Jonathan is leading our Tableau trainings, with proven, effective coursework tailored to your organizations needs. 

Read More

Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Dynamic Small Multiples in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

There have been a number of small multiple designs (see the list at the bottom of this post) in the past year or so and I am always a big fan of them, I figured why not take a chance at building one myself. If you have read any of my previous blogs, you may have noticed that I like the word “dynamic”, so I tried to figure out a way to incorporate a dynamic aspect into this visualization based on player data from the last six NBA seasons.

Dynamic?
One of the tricks with small multiple design is the fact that you have to lay out the graphs in a trellis panel (aka a grid). This can be accomplished by hard coding and sorting the partitioning dimension of your analysis, however, I challenged myself to calculate the location for each graph within Tableau on the fly. The reason why I wanted to do this was to be able to update, change between seasons, etc. without having to do any additional work on the trellis layout of the small multiple viz.

Read More

Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Live Polar Clock in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

After taking a look at the polar clock examples in both D3 and protovis and having studied Bora Beran's great radial treemap & bar chart post it seemed very possible to do this in Tableau with just a little incremental effort. I started from Bora's workbook and went from there.

For the polar clock each radial bar needs to be based on a different unit of time. See the below graphic for how I went about laying out the radial bars and units of time for this viz (mimicking the D3 and protovis versions).

Read More

Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Great Arcs in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is one of many posts on the subject of Great Arcs which ultimately lead us to the re-make of the 1983 cult classic Wargames in Tableau. I encourage you to read the whole series of posts by the wider team in addition to this one.

Read More

The New Fabulous Mapbox Studio Tutorial - Making a more Accessible Map

/
The New Fabulous Mapbox Studio Tutorial - Making a more Accessible Map

Here is an example of how beautiful your new maps can be.  This one was designed to be a background map that was elegant and provided an alternate to just the black, white, and that other one that no one uses, that come pre-designed in Tableau.   Check it out live and zoom in and out.  Notice the color gradations as you zoom in close.  Those would have taken forever to get right in Classic, not to mention how amazingly smooth it is to zoom in and out and pan around.  This is a map Ferrari!

Read More

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Mapbox Maps and Layers in Tableau 9.2

/
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Mapbox Maps and Layers in Tableau 9.2

One of the features that I am most excited about in 9.2 is the ability to add Mapbox map layers from the UI in Tableau instead of having to deal with all the .tms hackery!  If you are a beta tester for 9.2 and are publishing to Tableau Public, this is already available to you to use!  Ready to check out how easy it is now?  I’m going to use my Skyfall themed map to show off how easy it is to add multiple layers, and then we will create a “bog normal view swapper” (a very technical term that Allan Walker seems to use a lot).This will allow the user to change the maps and layers in the background of your published workbook.

Read More

Radial Trees in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Radial Trees in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

This is an incremental post to navigating your family tree from a few months back. This builds off of that visualization technique to manipulate the tree into a radial view. Also, as with the original, the tree is 100% dynamic and you can reset each node in the tree as the root node, toggle between tree views as well as change the API you are analyzing.

Read More

Alteryx Newbie Creates Dynamic Parameters in Tableau First Day by Jonathan Drummey

/
Alteryx Newbie Creates Dynamic Parameters in Tableau First Day by Jonathan Drummey

I wanted to take Alteryx out for a drive to see what it could do and decided to look into the Tableau XML, in particular using Alteryx to dynamically update Tableau parameters. This is something I've worked on before (see Creating a Dynamic Parameter with a Tableau Data Blend) and last year at the Tableau Conference Bryan Brandow & Andy Kriebel demoed a solution that they'd built for Facebook with the same basic idea as my Alteryx one. The particular use case is one of the most requested ones for dynamic parameters, namely updating the parameter list as the data changes.

Read More

DIY Chord Diagrams in Tableau - by Noah Salvaterra

/
DIY Chord Diagrams in Tableau - by Noah Salvaterra

Noah has been called "ridiculous", for his ability to make just about anything happen in Tableau, as readers of Jonathan Drummey's Drawing with Numbers have already seen. This post is no exception. I knew this was cooking, and my jaw still dropped.

Read More

Time to Get Hopping with Jump Plot by Chris DeMartini and Tom VanBuskirk

/
Time to Get Hopping with Jump Plot by Chris DeMartini and Tom VanBuskirk

In preparation for the upcoming Think Data Thursday, "I didn't know that was Tablossible", this post introduces a novel graph type referred to as the “Jump Plot”. Jump Plot is the brainchild of Tom VanBuskirk and was first implemented by Chris DeMartini using Tableau. This post is a combined effort from Tom and Chris. There are pieces of this post describing the benefits that Jump Plot provides, however additional details regarding the graph type and all it can offer can be found atjumpplot.com. In short, the Jump Plot provides a new way to visualize event data, with a focus on sequence distributions and bottlenecks. 

Read More

Tableau JS API 102

/
Tableau JS API 102

Padawan Challenge:  Build a Website with 4 fully responsive Tableau Dashboard views and add an Open Parameter that affects all of them.

Hello Dojo’ers!  Ready to have some more fun with Allan, Chris, and Anya?  Get out your favorite text editor, a bag of Skittles (for little rewards here and there) and lets get to it.  

Last year at the Tableau conference, DataBlick presented a lot of artsy fartsy bits on how the whole Tableau Dashboard should be a canvas.  Data, pixels, design elements, formatting and math should be used to paint the composition of the viz as a whole on the Tableau canvas.  In this lesson, we are zooming one step out, and now a Tableau viz becomes a bit of paint on an html canvas.

Read More

Navigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Navigating your Family History in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

We are going to build two tree views in Tableau, an ancestor view and a descendant view of a dynamically selected root person. Within this post I will walk through building the ancestor tree (a binary tree), feel free to reach out if you want more information on how the descendant tree was built, but will leave that to the imagination for now.

First things first, the credits. I started this effort with two main inputs, (1) the node tree link diagram that was explained and created by Jeffery Shaffer and (2) thedynamic parameter posts that Nelson Davis recently went through. I rely on both of these to get to the family tree viz shown here. In addition to these, I also askedAllan Walker, Noah Salvaterra and Anya A’Hearn for general help and guidance along the way.

Read More

Tableau JS API 101

/
Tableau JS API 101

In this post we start with the very, VERY, basics of setting up a simple webpage, embedding a Tableau viz in it, and then adding elements to your webpage that will interact with the Tableau viz. If you already are familiar with the JS API, check back in a few dojo lessons and we will move onto interacting with other web applications to do things like enable voice and gesture control, add sound or haptic feedback, or even apply it to an actual business use case :-p.  If you don’t even really know what html is, this is the place for you to get started on the path to JS API awesome.

Read More

Comb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

/
Comb the Hairball with BioFabric in Tableau by Chris DeMartini

Recently I posted about creating circular and hive plot network diagrams using Tableau and a question was posted around whether we could also execute theBioFabric network graph within Tableau. There is a lot of additional information about the BioFabric network graph at their website. The super-quick demo is a good intro to the graph if you have not seen it before.

The answer to the question posted is yes and this post is designed to walk you through the steps needed to build your own BioFabric graph within Tableau.

Read More

Building a Visualization of Transit System Data Using GTFS

/
Building a Visualization of Transit System Data Using GTFS

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way.  This post shows you how to use this data to create interactive transit maps in Tableau.

Read More